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Following the article on the real cost of a car, as it was published in the book called 10 Billion by Stephen Emmott, I am also sharing another chapter from this book, this one related to how much water is needed to produce some of our daily life items, like a simple cup of coffee.

How much water is needed to produce one single cup of coffee? Just as much water as is poured in? A little bit more than that…

The following is an extract from the book.

Hidden water

Hidden water is water used to produce things we consume but typically do not think of as containing water. Such things include chicken, beef, cotton, cars, chocolate and mobile phones.

For example: it takes around 3,000 litres of water to produce a burger. In 2012 around five billion burgers were consumed in the UK alone. That’s 15 trillion litres of water – on burgers. Just in the UK. Something like 14 billion burgers were consumed in the United States in 2012. That’s around 42 trillion litres of water. To produce burgers in the US. In one year.

It takes around 9,000 litres of water to produce a chicken. In the UK alone we consumed around one billion chickens in 2012.

It takes around 27,000 litres of water to produce one kilogram of chocolate. That’s roughly 2,700 litres of water per bar of chocolate. This should surely be something to think about while you’re curled up on the sofa eating it in your pyjamas.

But I have bad news about pyjamas. Because I’m afraid your cotton pyjamas take 9,000 litres of water to produce.

It takes 100 litres of water to produce a cup of coffee. And that’s before any water has actually been added to your coffee. We probably drank about 20 billion cups of coffee last year in the UK.

And – irony of ironies – it takes something like four litres of water to produce a one-litre plastic bottle of water. Last year, in the UK alone, we bought, drank and threw away nine billion plastic water bottles. That is 36 billion litres of water, used completely unnecessarily. Water wasted to produce bottles – for water.

It takes around 72,000 litres of water to produce one of the ‘chips’ that typically powers your laptop, Sat Nav, phone, iPad and your car. There were over two billion such chips produced in 2012. That is at least 145 trillion litres of water. On semiconductor chips.

In short, we’re consuming water, like food, at a rate that is completely unsustainable.

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